diamond geezer

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Wired for sound

My new iPod Shuffle and I are getting on famously. We first met last Friday. By Saturday our relationship was fully charged, on Monday we hung out in public for the first time and now we go everywhere together. This isn't the first time I've gone out with an mp3 player. I recently had a three-year fling with a Sony, but the whole affair had limited capacity and we soon got stuck in a groove. But now I've ditched that old streetwalker in favour of a sexier lightweight model. I'm rediscovering lost passions and breathing new life into old memories. My partner is forever whispering sweet nothings into my ear, and I never quite know what delights are lined up for me next. Ours may be a random romance, but I think we have a great future together.

And now you can keep tracks on how my new iAffair is proceeding. I've signed up for Audioscrobbler, which is a great little service for monitoring the music played on your computer. Attach Audioscrobbler to iTunes, or Winamp, or Windows Media Player (or a number of other less well known bits of musical software) and it will keep count of every song you play, forever. Each song registers in some huge central online database somewhere and this builds up into a fascinating summary of what people are listening to. Here's a link to what I've been listening to: audioscrobbler.com/user/dgeezer(9:30pm update: link now works, sorry)

I should point out that I've only had Audioscrobbler running for a couple of days, so my figures are a bit low at the moment. Come back in July and they'll be a lot more representative. And I like to listen to my music with the random shuffle feature turned on (it's more like listening to the radio that way), so don't read too much into the rank order of my top tracks and top artists. To make the list a bit more interesting I've decided to leave iTunes playing (with the volume muted) while I go to work today, just to give you something to watch. Or you can go and look at the audioscrobblings of some other bloggers, like Geoff (here), Gordon(here), Fraser (here) or Adrian (here). Audioscrobbler - it's a guilty pleasure, like flicking through someone's record collection while they're out of the room.

One of the joys of Audioscrobbler is being able to see what the rest of the world is listening to. For example... The most played track in the UK at the moment is The Killers - Somebody Told Me, and the most played artist is Radiohead Germans prefer Green Day, Brazilians are still big on the Beatles, and Metallica are still big in Finland The world's favourite David Bowie song is Ziggy Stardust, while the world's favourite Smiths song is This Charming Man Other people actually listen to the same obscure bands that you do (in my case that includes Denim, Spacehog and New Musik) If the Top 40 isn't enough for you any more, try the Top1000